I’m in a Sondheim mood so he’s on rotating on my iTunes. I’ve got a big assignment due next week and am not as far along as I want to be. And I’ve got people coming over for Hanukkah and might want to prepare some for that. Jessica has my food processor so grating the potatoes is gonna suck. I’m hitting up the guests — they may as well make themselves useful, right?

I’ve been thinking about the open adoption brochure and thinking about informed consent in adoption. And I’m also thinking about the conclusion of my book.

I’ve mentioned this before but when I worked at the shelter (a shelter based on feminist ideals) most of the women we served weren’t feminists. And because I was 22-years old and pretty naive, this surprised me. I thought every woman was a latent feminist. I thought that once she saw the way the patriarchy was hurting her that she’d embrace feminism and we’d all be on the same side. But instead I was serving women who sometimes were very happy not being feminists and they didn’t blame the patriarchy for their partner’s abuse or their own entrapment; sometimes they blamed feminism.

Sometimes you just have to meet people where they are.

I think about this with adoption. How do you serve women who don’t necessarily want to be served? Adoption industry reform is needed and it’ll go a long way but it won’t stop women from placing their babies. And should it? If we’re empowering women then does it make sense to disempower their choices?

I’m not such a strong reformer that I think every single adoption that goes through is a failure of the system. I think there’s a danger of infantalizing women much like abortion waiting periods and the like. I want women to have options — including post-placement but pre-adoption options — not barriers. Barriers are infantalizing because it’s telling women they’re too silly to know their own minds. (Note here: I’m not talking about women brainwashed by unethical adoption professionals. This is a different issue.)

I was talking to Erin about this once. If a woman came to me and said she was placing her baby because she believed her child was conceived in sin and deserved a good Christian two-parent home, I’d want to talk her out of it. From my perspective, her shame and her singleness aren’t good reasons to place. But what do I know? I’m a feminist. I can’t force my values on her. What I would want for her is an agency that’s ethical, that will give her all the information (including that the parents she chooses could divorce, that she will likely suffer from post-traumatic stress, that her child won’t care that she’s single) but won’t force her to make a decision either way. There’s a bigger issue at play, which is that she’s accepted her broader culture’s values. If she chooses an agency that resonates with those values, well, that adoption is likely going to happen. I don’t like it. I’m a feminist who pretty easily rejects those “traditional” values. But I’m not the boss of the world and I’m sure not the boss of an individual woman making choices.

(Sometimes it sucks to be a liberal because if you’re a liberal you’re always saying, “Hey, you have a right to your point of view” instead of taking a more conservative stance, which is to tell everyone who doesn’t agree with you that they’re wrong. Yeah, I get why liberals are sometimes such a joke.)

Adoption — as much as domestic violence and equal pay for equal work — is a feminist issue because it’s about how we devalue women and how we devalue mothers. It’s about how we punish women for their sexuality and for stepping outside of rigid mores. Women place because the services our government provides are inadequate (the adoption agency workers I spoke with told me that the women who contact them know all about welfare and food stamps and work programs — many of them still can’t afford to keep their babies). And women place because they are told they are inadequate by their community leaders. (Which leads to an interesting conundrum — is it more ethical to adopt a baby from a woman whose hand is forced by poverty or from a woman whose choice is freely made? It’s arguable.)

So. How do we create adoption policies that empower women given that:

  • Some women don’t want to be empowered.
  • Empowerment doesn’t go a long way when you can’t feed your family.

I mean, this is besides talking about unethical lawyers and facilitators. This is beyond talking about entitled prospective adoptive parents.

I keep thinking that this is the crux of my book. I’m a pro-choice feminist and because of that I’ve painfully watched women choose very very poorly for themselves. At shelter I’d provide women with information and support and sometimes they went the wrong (to my eyes) way because of what I interpreted as internalized -isms and they interpreted as free will. But I’m a feminist and that means I support women to make their own decisions but also feel an obligation to work towards a greater understanding. Thus our outreach program at shelter. Thus our domestic violence support groups and parenting program.

In this way I think every adoption is unethical because it’s built on injustice. But given that this injustice runs deep, given that some women would strongly disagree with me that there even is injustice, what’s a feminist to do?

It’s hard to dismantle a system when the system is in play. Sometimes it means straddling two worlds to work within a system to make it better and working without to take it down. And sometimes it means living with a lot of paradox.

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